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As techs tinker and converse tensely with the androids, we see a shockingly literal illustration of Marx’s notion of “estranged labor.”

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, the disturbing power of HBO’s Westworld makes more sense. There’s uncanny force in all those shots of androids waking up again and again, not knowing they’re still in a kind of dream. Those false awakenings that disguise persistent states of unconsciousness resonate uncomfortably with our own condition prior to November 8. Blindsided by Trump’s victory, it’s hard not to shudder when, in the ﬁrst season ﬁnale, one android warns another who’s convinced she’s ﬁnally fully conscious of the horrors of her reality: “You’ve ‘woken up’ many times before.”

We’re sure our eyes are open now, but how many of us on the Left thought we were already conscious of America’s violent rage and political apathy? How many of us believed we were actively sounding the alarm, only to realize how inconsequential our eﬀorts had been?

I had no idea, during the ﬁrst episodes of Westworld, why I was ﬁnding it so dreadfully compelling. The show’s basic premise is well-trodden turf for sci-ﬁ and horror: characters who act like self-directed individuals are actually automatons controlled by other forces, a la Blade Runner or The Matrix. In Westworld’s iteration, human “guests” pay top dollar to visit a high-tech theme park where they can live out their fantasies of old-time adventure in a Deadwood-like frontier town. There, they interact with android “hosts,” who act in movie-like narratives that provide seemingly spontaneous opportunities for consequence-free mayhem.

Yet, somehow, Westworld has found some fresh, unsettling angles. The show plunges us immediately into identiﬁcation with the androids (a tremendous improvement over the 1973 ﬁlm Westworld, which keeps us ﬁrmly aligned with the guests). The ﬁrst words we hear over a black screen are “Bring her back online.” We then see Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood)—the rancher’s young daughter, who’s actually one of the park’s oldest hosts—completely nude, seated in one of Westworld’s corporate labs, knees knocked awkwardly together like a discarded doll. She’s subjected to a series of gently probing questions asked by an oﬀ-screen character with a deep male voice. Later we recognize it as the voice of Bernard (Jeﬀrey Wright), the head programmer in charge of creating and maintaining the androids.

His key question, repeated often in the show, is, “Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”

And therein lies the lure of Westworld: It forces us to reckon with the fact that the androids might not be the only ones tragically estranged from reality. The discomfort this produces doesn’t depend on the viewer developing a sudden urge to run Turing tests on their loved ones. There’s plenty going on in the ster-ile oﬃces and damp basements of West-world’s corporate operations to make us break out in cold sweats because it's eerily reminiscent of a reality we know.

Take the quiet encounters of deceptively docile nude androids and clothed techs in glass-walled lab settings. They are some of the most threatening and compulsively watchable scenes in the show. But why? I’m enough of a damaged academic to automatically think, “Well, if the answer ain’t Freud, it’s Marx.”

It’s Marx. Westworld leads us to empathize ﬁrst with the amnesiac androids, who suﬀer merciless abuse by day and are patched up, memory-wiped and rebooted, by night. But through them, we come to recognize that Westworld’s human workers, who believe themselves to be in control, aren’t doing much better. Behind the scenes of the park, we see the techs toil in windowless quarters, jaded and furtive, rightly afraid of their bosses. As they tinker and converse tensely with the androids, we see a shockingly literal illustration of Marx’s notion of “estranged labor.” Workers alienated from their labor will come to see its product as “something hostile and alien,” in Marx’s words, a powerful object with a separate existence. In short, work sucks the life out of us and puts it into whatever it is we’re paid to produce. This nightmarish scenario plays out in the scenes between the android Maeve (Thandie Newton), a shrewd brothel madam, and the hapless techs growing more horriﬁed with each encounter. They feel exploited by the Westworld Company they work for and have been exploiting the androids in turn, prostituting them out for extra cash. But they’re increasingly out-matched by the objects they work on. We measure Maeve’s perfection of form against their ungainly physiques, and as she blackmails them to gain greater powers, her strength and brilliance against their weakness and stupidity.

To whom does this alien object confronting the worker belong? To the “master of labor”—the capitalist, that is. Overseeing Westworld’s hosts and guests are the corporate honchos vying for power, and we are encouraged to guess who is really running the show. Is it Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the surviving creator of the park, who seems privy to all information circulated within it? Could it be the park’s board of directors, unseen as yet but represented by the ruthless Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), who disdainfully informs icy head of operations Theresa Cullen (Sidse Babett Knudson) that all the hosts are worthless junk compared to the park’s intellectual property?

At the same time, we wonder which of the seemingly powerful ﬁgures aligned with the capitalist “boss” class will “wake up” to ﬁnd themself a controlled and exploited subordinate implanted with false memories. Again and again, Westworld exposes how characters’ understandings of themselves and their roles within the power structure of the park are dead wrong.

Looking back at Season 1, we can see the show is structured as a disturbing game based on the Marx-inspired concept of “false consciousness,” with characters trying to maneuver their way out of that wrongheaded state toward an accurate mental representation of the world. The operations and borders of Westworld are obscured and mystiﬁed, even to formidable ﬁgures such as the Man in Black (Ed Harris) seeking the “deeper game” in the park. Most characters’ exploitation by those in power is terrifyingly obscure to them.

Bernard, in particular, seems to represent perfectly the pontiﬁcating professional-class Left in Trump’s America, ensnared in the tragically arrogant conviction that it sees clearly what the exploited workers cannot grasp. In the end, his vantage point is just as compromised, to disastrous eﬀect.

The key to Westworld’s impact is the viewer’s identiﬁcation with the androids: the deepest sleepers, the ones who will have to come to consciousness many, many times. Recent events have demonstrated that we on the Left need a lot of practice at this kind of awakening, which is ironic given the way we tend to imagine ourselves as politically astute and aware. Like the androids, we’re now forced to reckon with the annihilating truths we sensed we’d have to face when we ﬁnally, fully woke up.

Yeah!! You can find Soviet Communism as well! You can find any damn thing you want and that would be it. That's what marxism is about.

Posted by Reilly J. Ignatius on 2016-12-29 12:21:06

Sorry, but this is a reductionist interpretation about "Westworld". Unfortunately, your reading about the narrative is guided by the historicism and reaches only particular elements and does not analyze the symbolyc and universal themes, such as AI ethics and the links between memoir and humanization process. You should read more Mircea Eliade and less Slavov Zizek.

Posted by Sílvio Anaz on 2016-12-29 06:17:15

The poor should choose not to get a college education, is what you're saying, and it warrants no response. Try again in 5 years after you read some Marx in the English. Communist Manifesto and Capital volume 1. But also, read some labor history. You will find books on these subjects at your local public library, a not for profit venture.

Posted by David Carr on 2016-12-21 00:23:08

College debt isn't some affliction that strikes down people unfairly, it is a choice. If a person chooses to take on more debt than they can afford, it's a bad choice. Sadly, a lot of debt problems are caused by people being misdirected. Guidance counselors, teachers, advisors and parents are afraid of de-railing a student's passion. Sometimes reality means what you want will never happen and often it is a good idea to delay gratification.

I had a professor with a PhD in economics. I took several courses with him on macroeconomics and various business courses. He had started out as a corporate lawyer and retired into teaching. One exercise he would always do would be to canvass the class on their degree path. He would then point out the job prospects and projected salaries of those career paths. Most of them didn't understand what he was trying to get them to think through and some would get angry at him. Colleges could use more faculty like him.

Most elective courses are useless in the scope of the average person's career path. I hope Ms. Jones pursued her Marx on her own time and didn't actually go into debt learning it from some academic beatnik hack. That said, electives can be good for a well rounded individual. Society needs thinkers as much as they do inventors, builders, designers and maintainers. My HVAC tech might go their whole life not knowing how ostracism helped voluntary public works in Athenian Democracy. They don't need it to make the equipment work and they can earn a decent living doing it.

You did catch me red handed. No I did not read Marx or Engels in the original German. I wouldn't waste my time. There's not much point reading it in English either, kind of like Mien Kampf. It's good to have basic overview of the thoughts of Marx and Hitler, if only to prevent their madness from revisiting the Earth. Reading them outright isn't worth a person's time and effort.

I did read Hermann Hesse and some Nietzsche in the original German. It's a great way to learn how badly many German words get butchered when they are brought into English without context or idiom.

Posted by jgelt on 2016-12-20 23:06:44

Cheap shot mocking someone about student loans. Then you dismiss "elective courses" which is the reactionary code word for arts and humanities and the social sciences.

And she clearly wrote "Marx-inspired," rendering your wikipedia based digression about Engels and German to English translation superfluous.

In the "real world" you mention, it's obvious you have not read Marx or Engels, much less in the original German.

Posted by David Carr on 2016-12-20 16:03:48

Still paying off your college loan Ms. Jones? This seems like material from an elective course desperately trying to find relevance in the real world. Marx never used the phrase “false consciousness” but Engels did. In this context Engels is speaking to the concept of ideology. The way English treats the term versus the original German conflates it to a meaning that infers far more to modern English speakers than to what Engels was actually trying to say. Additionally, Replicants in Blade Runner were clearly free willed. They did return to Earth due to some false perception of reality.

Posted by jgelt on 2016-12-20 10:01:30

[SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS]

This doesn't work for many reasons. To give one, the "masters" are creators here, not in the capitalist sense as much as they are actually like God, or parents of offspring. And it turns out they are not necessarily against their creations gaining consciousness and freedom. There is even a billionaire business man who is rooting for the hosts to become conscious. That's a different set of issues than a class relationship between boss and worker, which centers around the social relation to the means of production, and the boss expropriating value from the labor of the worker.

This show is more about the ethics of AI, about what it is to be conscious, and or human, and what responsibilities being the stewards of potentially living beings carries. It may also be a Promethean tale of stealing the fire of life to impart on another species.

As tempting as it is to overlay Marxist theory here, some beings are exploited and others are in control, I don't know of any scenario in a class struggle in which the bosses/ruling/owning class is pulling the strings in the background to make sure the revolution happens.